As a rule I’m skeptical of big brands “going green,” but it seems adidas might just be on to something. Recently the sporty retail giant teamed up with Parley for the Oceans—an idealistic group of “creators, thinkers and leaders” attempting to re-purpose the ocean’s overwhelming amount of trash into reusable material—for a mystery project. Monday at the United Nations the brand unveiled their collaboration: the world's first ever shoe upper made solely from harvested ocean plastic and illegal deep-sea gillnets. The nets were retrieved after a 110-day expedition by Parley partner organization Sea Shepherd, where they tracked an illegal poaching vessel off the coast of West Africa.

The prototype is just the first in a yet-to-be-released line of consumer-ready ocean-plastic products the brand will launch later this year. The brand’s UN presentation came as part of a broader summit on climate change titled “Oceans. Climate. Life.,” convened by the President of the General Assembly. During the event environmentalists, creatives, scientists, and entrepreneurs gave impassioned briefs on the dire state of our oceans and climate change fears, as Parley collaborators presented their plans, inventions, and possible solutions.

“At Parley for the Oceans, we want to establish the oceans as a fundamental part of the debate around climate change,” Cyrill Gutsch, founder of Parley for the Oceans, told the crowd. “Our objective is to boost public awareness and to inspire new collaborations that can contribute to protect and preserve the oceans. We are extremely proud that Adidas is joining us in this mission and is putting its creative force behind this partnership to show that it is possible to turn ocean plastic into something cool.”

Stay tuned to adidas and GOOD for more info on the collaboration, coming soon.

The sad thing about “smart” phones is that they very quickly lose their luster, usually just a few short years after purchase. Apps become incompatible, download times take longer and longer, and, the most popular complaint, batteries often don’t stay charged. But what if, instead of chucking your phone or its battery, you could use it down to very last drop? BETTER RE, a new kickstarter project, promises to extract the last amperes of energy as a “short term backup power pack solution.” At 67.65mm (2.66 inch) by 128.5mm (5.05 inch), this tiny device is slim, portable, and based on a simple, single platform—compatible with a variety of different smartphone batteries, both big (2,800 mAh) and small (1,810 mAh).

The devices themselves are sleek in appearance, and outfitted with PMC protection, circuitry safeguards to prevent over- charging and discharging, and come in a clear LED indication system that informs users if there’s any juice left in their old battery. The genius powering this device is, of course, magnets. Integrated into the system, they hold multiple modules securely and tightly for a more expandable power capacity. According to its makers, this smart-charger and reuse system is green through-and-through, and manufactured with eco-friendly materials like recycled aluminum and FSC-certified walnut and maple wood pieces. ‘Better Re’ comes in 4 different colors to get you jazzed about conserving energy resources.

Each city seems to tackle trash in its own, unique way. In New York City, that way seems to be almost non-existent, as this coffin left in the street and used-mattress mountain will attest. Hong Kong, however, has decided to go hi-tech in its approach to trash reduction. Recently, in honor of Earth Day, Hong Kong Cleanup, Ecozine, The Nature Conservancy, and Ogilvy teamed up to create a new eco-friendly campaign to fight the city’s ongoing litter issues with serious creativity. The Face of Litter utilizes DNA traces from street rubbish to construct life-like digital portraits of litterbugs. Scientists can determine a litterer's eye, hair, and skin color, even their ancestry, from DNA left on the smallest piece of trash. The technology is now so advanced it can even assess the shape of the trash person’s face, as well as a relatively accurate portrait.

The city has decided to run these damning images on mass transit, social media, and various print publications throughout town, thus proving that nothing works better than a good public shaming.

The recent littering pandemic in Hong Kong has proven too vast for the local government to ignore, and they’ve seen, according to Protein, “more than 16,000 tons of waste...dumped [into] the streets and public spaces.” Trash is such an issue in the region it’s been reported that China and Indonesia alone produce more than a third of the rubbish that ends up in the ocean. Unless we all want to visit trash island on vacation this summer, perhaps it’s time more cities started taking this drastic approach?

Rather than creating a one for one model, we wanted to integrate our social mission into the business. When someone buys from us they know they are turning some of the six billion t-shirts sold each year—made in the developing world—into fair wage jobs in the USA.

This past winter, we learned that our friend Brenna Schneider, was starting 99 Degrees Custom, a custom apparel manufacturing business with a social mission. Not only would she pay fair wages, but she was also planning to create a workplace that encouraged collaboration in a healthy environment. We felt our customers would appreciate Brenna’s work, and would want to see more textile jobs repatriated, so we partnered. We know how hard it is to get your first investment, so we decided to give 99 Degrees Custom cash up front to kickstart her business.

Now, through our Kickstarter campaign, we're giving you the opportunity to join us, and give her more orders so she can hire more workers and create a stronger middle class. This way you’ll also get a first crack at some of the new products we’re working on. Let’s show that Americans want to support fair wage jobs in the USA.

This project will be featured in GOOD's Saturday series Push for Good—our guide to crowdfunding creative progress.

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Mon, 20 May 2013 02:10:00 +0000Nathan Rothsteinhttp://magazine.good.is/posts/egg-shells-and-toilet-paper-rolls-one-man-s-recycling-is-another-s-diy-garden
http://magazine.good.is/posts/egg-shells-and-toilet-paper-rolls-one-man-s-recycling-is-another-s-diy-garden
You don't have to go to a fancy nursery to start greening your home. In fact, chances are you have everything already in your house or apartment to kickstart your own nursery. All you need is a few seeds, a little soil, a good light source, and some simple materials to use for containers to get your own garden going. Here's a round up of four of the more clever—and free—ways to get your seeds started before transferring to larger pots, using recycled items like toilet paper rolls, eggs shells and newspaper:

Egg shells: make a delicious egg breakfast for friends or family and then use your discarded shells to plant. Using a small spoon, drop some soil and your seeds into the shell, place by the windowsill for a few days, and watch them sprout.

Toilet paper rolls: Usually the end of a roll of toilet paper signals disaster, but this idea for toilet paper planters should help. For a full tutorial of how to take advantage of your bathroom detritus go here.

Yogurt (or other plastic) containers: The best way to recycle your unwanted plastic is to create new life from it. Simply poke some holes in the bottom of a container, add soil, seeds, and water, and you're good to go.

Newspaper origami: this method will satisfy the crafter in you and find a use for Sunday's paper. Just make sure your newsprint is printed with vegetable based inks, and follow this step by step guide or the tutorial below.

This post is part of the GOOD community's 50 Building Blocks of Citizenship—weekly steps to being an active, engaged global citizen. This week: Plant a Guerrilla Garden. Follow along and join the conversation at good.is/citizenship and on Twitter at #goodcitizen.

Tusignwire’s efforts to get the project off the ground will coincide with TEDxCity2.0 on October 13, 2012, dubbed “a day of inspiration” for TEDx communities to celebrate the work of “innovators and organizers, stewards and artists, builders and tastemakers.”

Join GOOD and IBM for a live tweet chat on Friday, June 1 at 1 p.m. ET (#zerowasteIBM) about the future of recycling and how trash collection can go from "waste management" to "resource recovery." Instead of taking all collected trash straight to landfills, companies like Recology are rethinking how to manage the waste stream. Teaming up with IBM, Reoclogy is working to make San Francisco a zero waste city by using data to tailor recycling management to specific neighborhoods, as well as composting and extracting reusable items before they reach landfills.

As a result of their work in San Francisco, Recology customers reduced the garbage they send to the landfill by 49.7 percent—from 730,000 tons in 2000 to 367,300 tons in 2011. In addition, nearly 1.2 million tons of paper were recycled (the equivalent to 20 million trees), and 135,000 tons of metal were repurposed as well, equaling a savings of 19 million gallons of gas.

Join the conversation with George McGrath, COO of Recology; Lisa Hoyos, Strategic Field Initiatives of BlueGreen Alliance; our own Chris Steinkamp, Head of Partnerships & Strategy at GOOD; and several other panelists who will be fielding questions and talking about how the future of resource recovery can shape our cities.

To participate in a tweet chat on sustainability, follow @SustainableIBM and look for the hashtag #zerowasteIBM on June 1 at 1 p.m. ET.

You read correctly. The Revive Your Leftovers project has two winners! We received fantastic submissions, some so delicious we wanted to make them from scratch and a couple that, well, made us appreciate your creativity. The two winning recipes are versatile and easy to use with whatever ingredients you have on hand. Toss them all on store-bought or homemade dough as Debbie Sharratt does and you have a a tasty recycled pizza. Or add fresh vegetables and herbs to last night's leftovers like Mariela Alvarez and you'll give your dish fresh new flavor. We hope these recipes will help you make use of all the food in your kitchen.

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Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000Elizabeth Inglesehttp://magazine.good.is/posts/intermission-sad-stuff-on-the-street
http://magazine.good.is/posts/intermission-sad-stuff-on-the-street
Among photographers (of both the pro and Instagram variety), a popular sub-genre of ruin porn is abandoned stuff on the street. Nothing conveys inevitable disillusionment, the passage of time, accidental loss, and existential despair with such allusion-rich incongruity as a stuffed teddy bear in a puddle, or crockpot still in its 1970s packaging, forlornly promising delicious no-effort meals from its new home on the curb.

Former girlfriend/boyfriend Sloane Crosley and Greg Larson recently started a blog to transition their failed long-distance relationship into friendship by sharing their appreciation for all the "Sad Stuff" they spot on the street in their respective cities. Called Sad Stuff on the Street, it is, of course, quite sad, but also quite funny. As Crosley explains,

Basically, a sad thing on the street should make you want to smile and frown simultaneously. It should tear your face apart.

Not everything that is abandoned on the street is sad; sometimes it is just interesting or funny. Crosley and Larson have expounded on their curatorial system at amusing length, but the jist of it is, sad things on the street are like love: you just know.

That said, wanting to take an iPhone photo of the object in question is a tell-tale sign:

It's like the word that fancy arts people use when first laying eyes on a great painting. Frisson!You just found a beautiful sad thing on the street!! There's a shock of impression, a little shudder in your chest, and suddenly all that matters is taking out your iPhone and snapping a picture so you can send it to someone who will be glad to see it.

Lighting designer Benoit Deseille and artist Benedetto Bufalino transformed this phone booth in Lyon, France, into an aquarium, as part of the city's annual Festival of Light. In an accompanying statement, the artists explain the inspiration behind the piece:

With the advent of the mobile telephone, telephone booths lie unused. We rediscover this glass cage transformed into an aquarium, full of exotically colored fish; an invitation to escape and travel.

It's a creative way to transform disused infrastructure into an everyday source of wonder and beauty—or, if you're of a more pessimistic frame of mind, a vision of our climate-changed future.

On top of that, there's something whimsically compelling about seeing tropical fish interacting with a phone: cross-species communication, anyone?

You probably made a mixtape back in the day. And from the safety of retrospection, you can admit filling it with all the Morrissey-provided angst it could fit, all in hopes of communicating the depths of your love to that girl in third period you could only manage to speak to in monosyllables.

Today, your earnest masterpiece is most likely one of many abandoned cassette tapes collecting dust in garages, closets, and thrift stores across America-square victims of both the CD and MP3 player. But mixed-media artist Erika Iris Simmons has found a creative way to breathe new life into the outmoded media, creating portraits of rock icons using the uncoiled ribbon within the tapes.

Treehugger has photos of a few portraits from the series (Simmons's Flickr page has more), along with details on the recycled art:

Simmons, who works under the pseudonym Iri5, first stumbled upon the idea to transform cassettes into portraits after noting a similarity between a pile of unrolled film and the Jimmy Hendrix's untamed locks. She soon set out to make her first piece: a portrait of the rock idol himself.

Other materials repurposed by Simmons includes magazine clippings, film tape, and playing cards-non-traditional mediums that make the old new in a way that's both modern and sustainable.

What artist would you like to see Simmons tackle next with her cassette tape art? I call Thom Yorke. Capturing that lazy eye would be a challenge all its own.

Recycling is one of the three sacred tenets of the waste hierarchy. Along with reducing and reusing, it has become a mantra for environmentally-conscious, sustainable living. As it happens, however, not everything can be recycled with the same impunity as paper or plastic.

Grist has a report detailing the potential hazards of recycling coal ash for other uses, prompting a more cautious mindset when it comes to utilizing industrial waste products:

Some of the reuses for coal ash, such as recycling it into concrete, are not very controversial even among environmental advocates, since they're believed to lock in toxic contaminants. But there are growing concerns about other reuses of coal ash. For example, the recent revelation that Chinese-manufactured drywall made with coal ash was releasing noxious chemicals inside people's homes spurred a CBS investigation that also found problems with U.S.-made drywall products. The discovery led the Consumer Product Safety Commission to call for a closer look at drywall products made with coal ash.

Not to say that we should stop recycling, but that we should be more cognizant of the safety of such undertakings beforehand. Much like anything else, eagerness without proper information can breed tragic consequences.

We encourage our families and neighbors to get a big, blue recycle bin of their very own and scoff at those who absentmindedly toss their plastic Coke bottles into the garbage can, but once the trash leaves the curb, is there really any assurance that all of the materials will be reprocessed? And what about the mass amounts of garbage we dispose of every day, from Kleenex to fast food containers to shoe boxes, where do they go? A documentary posted today on Treehugger goes beyond the curb and follows our trash all the way to the overflowing landfill:

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage is a mini documentary exploring dumps and our trashy habits, and shows some of the fascinating evolution behind the modern landfill, including how machinery took over dumps and changed the way we deal with trash - not necessarily for the better.

The 20-minute documentary challenges the propensity towards an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality, and will hopefully make viewers reevaluate their trash. Head over to Treehugger to check out the full video.Screenshot via Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage]]>
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:30:35 +0000Alicia Capetillohttp://magazine.good.is/posts/creative-clean-up
http://magazine.good.is/posts/creative-clean-up
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Well, Design Within Reach is now accepting entries for their annual Champagne Chair Contest. The challenge is to turn the remnants of your New Years drinking (cork, wire, and labels from up to two Champagne bottles) into a cool looking miniature chair. Entries, due on Friday, will be judged on "craftsmanship, creativity, character, and innovative use of materials." Three winners get an indestructable (click the link to see) Morgans Chair (pictured below), and the top 50 will be included in a traveling in-store exhibition.